Tanguy Ortolo

Spam trap

Dear lazyweb, I am considering to implement spam traps and evaluate their efficiency. The idea as rather simple:

1. publish some real-looking email addresses on websites, in ways that no human would use them to send legitimate mail, for instance in hidden texts, or in texts clearly stating they should not be used;
2. when my mail server receives a message for one of these address, blacklist the originating server for some time so it cannot spam real recipients.

Read more How to implement a Postfix spam trap?

A strange problem

Yesterday, I was reported a funny problem with the dokuwiki Debian package's postinst script, which contains a piece of shell script similar to that:

# Check the destination does not already exist
if [ ! -e /the/destination ]
then
    ln -s /some/file /the/destination
fi

It was failing with that message: ln: failed to create symbolic link '/the/destination': File exists. Even though I had just tested it did not exist!

Read more Beware of symlinks when testing a file existence

I just received an USB headset from Plantronics. Since it has a keypad on it, with buttons to mute the microphone and to adjust the volume, it appears as both a sound card and a keyboard. Problem: that keyboard sends a mouse ButtonPress 1 (yes, a mouse button event, do not ask me how that is materially and logically possible) when the microphone is muted, and only sends the corresponding ButtonRelease 1 when it is unmuted. As a result, the pointer behaves as if the mouse button was pressed continuously, rendering the desktop quite unusable.

Read more Using a Plantronics USB headset under X.Org/Linux

La célébration des 15 ans du Crans comprendra une signing party PGP et accréditation CAcert, le dimanche 20 octobre à 16h30.

Read more Signing party aux 15 ans du Crans

Like it or not, XML has been used everywhere, even in cases where text-based formats would have been sufficient. Unfortunately, standard tools such as grep, sed or awk are not really adapted to work with XML. Let us take the following example:

<chapter
    xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0">
    <title>The Debian distribution</title>

    <para>Debian is a free operating system, describing itself as “the
    universal operating system”. It is mostly known as a GNU/Linux
    distribution, but it also exist in other variants such as GNU/Hurd
    and GNU/kFreeBSD…</para>
</chapter>

Read more Working with XML using standard Unix tools